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What does DX11 Hardware Tesselation mean?
- Thread starter Keeper
- Start date
scotty777
...doesn't know
hmmm, then you don't understand much. Tessellation is basically a scalable process by which you increase the number of polygons by x2, x4, x8, x16 and so on... depending on your graphics card, you can tessellate more and more. The main idea behind tessellation is that it's practically unlimited (you can tessellation a billion times if you want), but the hardware is the limiting factor.
If you just had a regular graphics card, say a GTX295, because it doesn't have a dedicated tessellation unit, if you start to tessellate, you use a lot of processing power to just tessellate, thus it's impractical. However, microsoft seem to have actually done something right, although, late.
DX10 was meant to have tessellation as a standard, but Nvidia said it wasn't viable and microsoft dropped it in DX10 (although AMD still kept the "old" tessellation unit in their HD2000, HD3000 and HD4000 series, simply because it wasn't really worthwhile taking out)
So now with DX11, it's a full standard. So in order to use tessellation, you need a DX11 card
. However, tessellation also means that instead of having massive polygons to number crunch, which chows your graphics cards bandwidth, and processing power (think crysis), you just render on the fly
. Because it's scalable, if you can a HD5770, you can play with x4, if you have a HD5970 you can play with x16.
But to cut a long story short, tessellation is like AA, the higher you tessellate, the greater the drop in FPS. Don't be fooled by the whole "tessellation doesn't use much processing power" shyte, it's like AA, x2 AA doesn't use much processing, but when you go up to x8, then you see epic drops in AA. Although, we are yet to see tessellation in action, and we also don't know how refined it is, nor do we know how effective the tessellation units are.
Ag, personally, this is the real big leap in gaming technology though. Physics is "nice" but doesn't make the gamer think "holy ****, that's amazing!", it just means you can blow up shyte, and what not, which is nice, but won't be sorely missed. Tessellation is the next step towards life like graphics, and once you start tessellating you will think "holy shyte, i've been missing out"
. It's a nice middle step between current graphics and ray-tracking 
ok thanks for clearing it up, although what i think they meant is that getting that much detail with tesselation uses less power than using other means, or am i off again?hmmm, then you don't understand much. Tessellation is basically a scalable process by which you increase the number of polygons by x2, x4, x8, x16 and so on... depending on your graphics card, you can tessellate more and more. The main idea behind tessellation is that it's practically unlimited (you can tessellation a billion times if you want), but the hardware is the limiting factor.
If you just had a regular graphics card, say a GTX295, because it doesn't have a dedicated tessellation unit, if you start to tessellate, you use a lot of processing power to just tessellate, thus it's impractical. However, microsoft seem to have actually done something right, although, late.
DX10 was meant to have tessellation as a standard, but Nvidia said it wasn't viable and microsoft dropped it in DX10 (although AMD still kept the "old" tessellation unit in their HD2000, HD3000 and HD4000 series, simply because it wasn't really worthwhile taking out)
So now with DX11, it's a full standard. So in order to use tessellation, you need a DX11 card
However, tessellation also means that instead of having massive polygons to number crunch, which chows your graphics cards bandwidth, and processing power (think crysis), you just render on the fly
Because it's scalable, if you can a HD5770, you can play with x4, if you have a HD5970 you can play with x16.
But to cut a long story short, tessellation is like AA, the higher you tessellate, the greater the drop in FPS. Don't be fooled by the whole "tessellation doesn't use much processing power" shyte, it's like AA, x2 AA doesn't use much processing, but when you go up to x8, then you see epic drops in AA. Although, we are yet to see tessellation in action, and we also don't know how refined it is, nor do we know how effective the tessellation units are.
Ag, personally, this is the real big leap in gaming technology though. Physics is "nice" but doesn't make the gamer think "holy ****, that's amazing!", it just means you can blow up shyte, and what not, which is nice, but won't be sorely missed. Tessellation is the next step towards life like graphics, and once you start tessellating you will think "holy shyte, i've been missing out"
scotty777
...doesn't know
well, it does use less power then traditional methods.